Material Culture and Mass Consumerism

by Daniel Miller

Exploring materialism and social relationships in modern culture Material Culture and Mass Consumption offers an in-depth exploration of objects, objectification, ideology, and materialism in modern society. Drawing from Hegel, Marx, Munn, and Simmel, the discussion delves into the physicality of the material world and attempts to understand materialism as a form of cultural expression. Targeting mass production as the root of mass consumption, rather than the result, this book positions material goods at odds with genuine social interaction and questions these relationships from the abstract to the intensely specific.

Genres: Anthropology, Material Culture, Nonfiction, Cultural, Philosophy

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 19, 1987

About the author

Daniel Miller is Professor of Anthropology at UCL, author/editor of 37 books including Tales from Facebook, Digital Anthropology (Ed. with H. Horst), The Internet: an Ethnographic Approach (with D. Slater), Webcam (with J. Sinanan), The Comfort of Things, A Theory of Shopping, and Stuff.

Reviews

[Victoria]

writing a paper on material culture, going to assume by time I submit I will have read this entire book

[Noora · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seeing as I haven't read a ridiculous amount of anthropology books, I don't feel like I'm qualified to rate it. Anyway, I gave it 4 stars because I learned so much. One star knocked off because it wasn't as entirely mind boggling as other anthropology material I've read. This is an intense read that is incredibly hard to read in one sitting. I read it in 4 sittings and I was seriously exhausted by the end of it.

Unless you're terribly interested in anthropology, I don't see why you would want to read it. I read this book for a paper I was writing.

[Adrian Fanaca · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is focusing a lot on the relationship between subject and object from a philosophical perspective. What is my relationship with objects around, and for whom am I an object? These are important questions and it takes time to grasp them. Only for the fact that this author made me think about these aspects of reality, I am giving thumbs up to this book. What is missing here is a bit more work on connecting the different parts of the book, which seemed to be written independently and put together just for the sake of writing a book, which lets you wonder why do we jump from subject - object relationships from a Hegelian perspective to Simmel money theory. Maybe I should have spent more time to grasp the philosophical relation between subject and the object of money by myself before giving a book review.

[Yokusun Basi]

Material Culture and Mass Consumption by Daniel Miller (1991)

[iz]

anthropological theory sooo fucking dense

[Gretchen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was getting historiography flashbacks from this one. It's heavy. It's really great, but I think you won't get a whole lot out of it unless you're relatively familiar with Hegel and Marx and both their ideas on objectification.

That said, this is an important text within design history and it's easy to see why. It is full of seminal ideas about objects and artifacts and how we think about them and see them. Definitely one of those books that can't really be absorbed in one sitting and that is worth revisiting multiple times.